Post-Hegemonic Regionalism in the Americas

Toward a Pacific–Atlantic Divide?

Jose Briceno-Ruiz, Isidro Morales

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317077343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Regionalism in Latin America and the Caribbean has experienced transformations over the last few years. After more than a decade of a hegemonic model based solely on free-market principles, the regional and global transformation that occurred in the first decade of the new millennium modified the way of understanding economic development and the insertion of regional blocs in global affairs. Old initiatives have been reconsidered, new schemes have emerged, and new principles going beyond trade issues have modified the norms and processes of regional economic integration. This book reviews these recent transformations to depict and explain the new trends shaping regional blocs and cooperation in the Americas.

1 Rethinking our region in a post-hegemonic moment

Pia Riggirozzi and Diana Tussie

Introduction

The time is ripe to revisit how we have understood and acted in the world, not only because of ongoing changes in the nature and coordinates of power in the global political economy, but also because the study of International Relations as such is opening up spaces for knowledge that is regionally situated and, even more importantly, because we can consider wider conceptions of agency. Claiming, framing, and advancing norms in global governance have often been associated with power, influence, and hegemonic dominance of Northern-based states, their business, and nongovernmental organizations. This fact is not surprising, as policy makers and social groups from the developed world have often set agendas in global politics. What is visible and urgent, what shapes ideas in global governance and beliefs about international behavior, was also considered a matter of high politics, where rule-makers from powerful Northern countries dominated resistance and ensured that rule-takers did not upset the balance.

These affirmations deserve a closer examination. Developments in global governance over the last 15 years suggest that the importance of regions and Southern regionalism is increasing in global politics, and that integration ambitions and initiatives are not only anchored in trade and investment but go beyond to embrace welfare policy. These ambitions are being played out through new modalities of region building and diplomacy. Conceptually, changes in ambitions and modalities of regional integration, as well as the opportunities that regional governance represent for changing national and international norms through diplomacy, substantiate what we called post-hegemonic regionalism in South America (Riggirozzi & Tussie, 2012). Post-hegemonic regionalism has its ebbs and flows, but it is emerging in a world order of multiple competitions, a scenario that Acharya (2014) calls a multiplex world. The central feature of a multiplex order is that it does not have a single line of control but rather moving hierarchies. It gives more play to regions, regional powers, and regionalisms. Moreover, regionalism in the multiplex order should no longer be judged by how well it can reach European standards in Snow White fashion but by its own merits. Latin American regionalism has a long history, starting in the 19th century as a platform for advancing independence, for organizing but also facilitating great power intervention into the 20th century and for the promotion of economic development. Latin America was a strong advocate of regional organization at the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations. It was the first region to promote a regional development bank – the Inter-American Bank – and it was quick to set up the Latin American Free Trade Association in 1960.

We argue that regional structures have a transformative capacity in leading new processes of cooperation and sectoral integration, which can in turn affect social policy and welfare within the region. At the same time, the presence of regional organizations in public policy making is a subject that is increasingly gaining space on North–South and South–South development agendas. These are intriguing entry points for research into regional integration and for exploring whether and how new commitments of regional organizations are being implemented in international policy domains and policy processes.

The region is an arena that involves at least partly institutionalized or routinized shifts in the instruments through which state power is exercised, the actors that exercise it, and the ideological rationalization of its use. This post-hegemonic moment is an opportunity for Southern regionalisms to engage as standard-bearers in the advocacy of social development and equity and rights, and more importantly, to reveal the “Southern origins of norms” in international relations. The challenge is not merely one of symbolic politics led by left-leaning presidents railing against U.S. domination. Relations between the United States and Latin America face a profound change in the coordinates of regional power, diplomacy, and cooperation. The “post-hegemonic” region-building manifested in a reorganization of the regional scenario and the emergence of new efforts, such as the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) in 2004, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) in 2008, and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in 2011, should be seen as manifestations of this trend. The fluidity of the region and its highly politicized dynamics have also seen more recent commercial agreements, such as the Pacific Alliance in 2014.

Our second argument therefore is that as International Relations (IR) unfolded with a continued focus on global structures and top-down structures of governance, there are new opportunities to capture the features and contributions of regionalism and regional governance. IR in many ways was disciplined by and defined in terms of by Atlanticism; although structural phenomena in other policy and geographical spaces may have been points of resistance, they were not seen to make a difference in global issues. We now have the challenge to transcend blind spots and to interrogate how regions in the South and Southern regionalisms co-constitute global governance and become political spaces where policies are redefined and norms of global political economy are reworked.

The analysis is addressed as follows. First, we expose the foundations of International Relations as an Atlanticist discipline that shuns the co-constitutive nature of other parts of the world and their agency. Next, we analyze the intellectual trajectory of regions and regionalism as an often-trivialized concept. We claim that this is not necessarily due to academic neglect but rather a consequence of how regions in the South were captured by the ideological, political, and geographic constrictions of the Cold War. Lastly, we move toward a new research agenda that engages with current changes in the global political economy. In doing so, we move from the classical conception of regions as spheres of influence or regions of transmission belts of global engines to regions as pivotal spaces where politics are (re)thought and happen “from the nation up.” Regions as geography and regionalism as governance call for a sui generis place in an extended global conversation about the nature and contours of theory and practice.

The twilight of an Atlanticist discipline?

Mainstream International Relations has been built by dropping from view the realities of colonization and the struggles of decolonization. A pecking order was justified, and consequently there was an ingrained concern with system maintenance, a tendency to legitimize status quo power relations. When the breakdown of the Bretton Woods order gave rise to International Political Economy, new contributions to scholarly enquiry opened up traditional concerns: the emergence and operation of multilateral institutions and the position of the United States as a hegemonic power. The focus on economic factors and market interests allowed new understandings of otherwise moral claims.

What other government could have spent more than 500 billion dollars on a war in Iraq? No one else could have done that. The United States can do that only because of the international position of the dollar as the world’s main currency.

(Cohen, 2008, quoted in Schouten)

Thus, a restricted focus, even a self-styled demarcation, was born: “l´etat c´est moi.”

In this sense, a good deal of mainstream IR has not only been built as an extension of imperial concerns, but what happened “out there,” when of any interest, was placed under a framework that was not always applicable. Such lenses left behind a good deal of the way IR evolved in other areas of the world, hence alternative traditions were often neglected and at times even deprecated as too ideological. Mainstream studies in short ignored indigenous bodies of literature, shelved as peculiar to “area studies,” and missed out on how the region was in itself a political force nationally and internationally.

What these ideas suggest is that studies unfolded with a continued focus on the North Atlantic paradigm; the structural phenomena in other policy spaces and at other levels of analysis were not given a voice. There was an inability to account for problems and issues that did not concern the Western world. To take an example, even if creditors cannot be creditors without debtors, debtor politics and their travails were relegated to the subaltern level of policy (Tussie, 1988). Even if the struggle of developing countries, and hence development as such, was co-constitutive of global processes, it was shunned to the sidelines. In essence, with excessive homogenization only one region was taken up, the North Atlantic – diffused and universalized – while the rest remained on its fringes. Two parallel tracks resulted in International Relations that barely touched each other – one that looked at the factors that shaped the “whole system” and another that analyzed chains of dependence, domination, or simply abuse by more powerful actors. In the process, relations among some countries and regions that make up the global political economy were ignored, and development in these regions was seen as simple reflections of the “global” process. In essence, the great challenge today is to understand the complexities of a decentered world and to appreciate the space for agency.

The scale at which an issue is governed – whether local, national, regional, or global – is never neutral, but is one of the most important factors shaping the outcome of social and political conflict. Shifting from a singlehanded national scale to a new functionally delimited space can change dramatically the configuration of actors, resources, political opportunity structures, costs, and benefits, and thereby political outcomes. Accordingly, political forces will support or resist rescaled initiatives depending on whether the rescaling involved advancing their interests and normative agendas.

Regional analysis adds an exciting dimension to the study of International Relations – International Political Economy, which focused too closely and for too long on Western states and societies. Governments’ view of the world and its policies reflect geography as much as any other factor. For a discipline that is inclined to think in terms of stark, binary oppositions between rule-takers and rule-makers, the rise of regional powers appears to be a welcome and particularly dramatic change (Nel & Nolte, 2010; Nolte, 2011). In the case of Latin America, the prevalence of a theoretical model in which the United States was seen as enjoying “perennial predominance” (Smith, 2000, p. 4) over a region seen as a dependent and defenseless object has lost sway. By contrast, the region has become a subject. Regional logics, and contradictions, now predominate in their own right rather than serving as mere transmission belts of a single line of control.

Regionalism as dimension of analysis

Latin America has a long tradition of diverse regional associations. In some ways, the region is unique because of its shared beginnings in the system of states, its commonality in terms of Iberian as well as indigenous culture (Fawcett, 2005), its exposure to the reach of the United States, and the ultimate mark of North American hegemony. In this sense, regionalism as a dense web for the diffusion of policies dates as far back as the struggles for independence and the coetaneous conformation of republics. We can trace the roots of Latin American regionalism to the 19th century, when the processes of independence and nation building arose with the end of European colonialism and intervention. Since then, an idea of “region” started to develop (Deciancio, 2016). This is a distinctive birthmark, which also helps to explain the particular trajectory of Latin American regionalism and its mix of contestation, adaptation, and pragmatism to a number of political dilemmas. It can be argued that Latin Americans were the true pioneers of regionalism, 100 years before the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) (Acharya, 2014; Deciancio, 2016).

Besides the time frame, Latin America is set apart from other expressions of regionalism around the world by its exposure to a particular set of influences. Today, frontiers are mostly consolidated, a characteristic reflected in the lowest levels of armed conflicts among states and the lowest levels of military expenditures in terms of percentages of Gross National Product (GNP) worldwide. The 1968 Treaty of Tlatelolco prohibited and prevented the use, manufacture, production, or acquisition of nuclear weapons in the region at an early stage, turning Latin America into the only continent free from nuclear-war competition since latecomers Brazil and Argentina finally agreed to sign it in the 1990s. These commonalities have provided a distinctive analytical and normative frame.

Likewise, the economic and political dynamics of the Cold War in the Americas were drivers of regional order pinned together on the hegemonic position of the United States. The United States was perceived as “disciplining” and policing the region through Cold War alliances such as the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance. Moreover, institutions such as the Organization of American States were meant to organize and provide order while at the same time securing regional spheres of influence (Marini, 1977, pp. 20–39; Hirst, 2003). After the 1964 coup, Brazil – under the Castelo Branco government (1964–67) – positioned itself as the privileged partner of the United States in Latin America. The way in which regionalism unfolded subsequent to spheres of influence pervaded the economic realm and defined the political economy of development, rescaling the principles of the Washington Consensus in the 1990s. Trade became the mechanism for the transmission and adaptation of neoliberal principles. New regions were created, such as the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) in 1993, and Mercosur in 1991. Competition over their potential expansion brought these organizations into opposition from time to time, leading to continued tensions over modes of regional associations and ultimately regional leadership. Mercosur was widely believed to create a window of opportunity for contesting the U.S.-led mode of regionalism – an opportunity that was largely curtailed by the realities of dependent economies and unstable political systems, but that has not lost its vigor. In fact, changing political–economic circumstances, including the changing coordinates of trade and power in the region since the early 2000s, meant a jump-start for motivations of autonomy development and regionalism through alternative projects such as the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), forged by the late president Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), closely associated with Brazil’s regional agenda. These projects – which are at odds with the spearhead of U.S. hegemony – were not only unprecedented in terms of regional governance but also raised new questions about how coexisting yet competing regionalism in the Americas should be analyzed. Both aimed to ensure stability and avoid external intervention, i.e. a repeat of externally supported takeover of power such as the one suffered by Chávez in 2002. Both place their respective member countries as a central unifying pole of a potentially autonomous South American bloc that extends soft power attributes and encourages cooperation across a number of issues, though naturally the ALBA project has bumped against the decline of oil prices in the post-Chávez era.

All told, the ability of the United States to shape regional orders and institutions has declined. Regions and countries have acquired lives of their own. In Latin America, the ability of the United States to shape regional discourses and institutions suffered a serious blow with the demise of the Free Trade Area of the Americas in 2005. Although we cannot write off U.S. influence over events south of its border, the regional “box” has been opened. Regions have been set free, as Hurrell graphically put it (1995), and so have a number of countries that are now seen as regional powers.

In Latin America, regionalism should be seen as a space where actors reenact state–society relations on a different level, in ways capable of shaping policy preferences in areas beyond trade and finance. Accordingly, new areas of regional cooperation – including welfare, security and defense, energy, infrastructure, and financial cooperation – have replaced trade as the predominant focal point for cooperation. In this sense, they have become governance actors across broad areas of policy.

The repoliticization of regional cooperation since the early 2000s has resulted in the rebuilding of agendas supported by new normative frameworks that emphasize, in contrast with past experiments, rights-based approaches to social development and inclusion. Finally, from an IR perspective, these initiatives are driven by a conscious search for greater influence in the international arena (Riggirozzi & Tussie, 2012; see also Sanahuja, 2011). Seen in this way, regionalism not only institutionalizes trans-border practices but also reflects transformations of the regional space. What the region means for state and non-state actors can be signified and resignified as motivations, interests, ideas, narrative, and political economic policies undergo changes.

The regional cloth as epistemic foundation

The regional as a socially constructed space predates nation building (Deciancio, 2016) and predates the furor of globalization. In the 1990s, significant regional trade integration took off in lockstep with the literature on globalization. Scholars embraced the concept of the “new regionalism” (NR) to reflect the complex linkages among regionalism, globalization, and the neoliberal transformation. While the “old regionalism” of the 1950s to the 1970s manifested regionalized forms of regulated markets and high tariffs, “new” regional formations were tied to the transnationalization of trade and production and the progressive liberalization of markets in developing countries (Devlin & Estevadeordeal, 2001; Gomez Mera, 2008). NR captured the intellectual imagination of scholars concerned with regionalism beyond...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Rethinking our region in a post-hegemonic moment
• 2 The renewal of U.S. “free trade” diplomacy in the Americas: from NAFTA to a deeper agenda of “competitive liberalization” for the region
• 3 From open regionalism to neo-extractivism: a new geography of trade in Latin America?
• 4 Latin America beyond the continental divide: open regionalism and post-hegemonic regionalism co-existence in a changing region
• 5 Beyond the Pacific–Atlantic divide: Latin American regionalism before a new cycle
• 6 Resilient or declining? Mercosur and the future of post-neoliberal regionalism in Latin America
• 7 The Pacific Alliance and the construction of a new economic regime?: lights and shadows of the renewal of open regionalism
• 8 Regionalism in Central America: an “all-in” strategy
• 9 Post-hegemonic regionalism in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela
• Conclusions
• Index